When making a game, an important part of the experience is the main menu. Usually, it is the first impression of your game that the player will receive and can cement the players mood for the rest of your game experience. For our main menu I created a few different sounds using BFXR, for different interactions with the UI. BFXR is an online tool that you can use to create video sounds, royalty free. It is a great tool for making placeholder audio, or in this case, UI sounds.

The first sound I made was a sound that activates when the mouse is hovered over a button. This sound is a very short, blunt sound that is quiet, but subtle enough that the player would recognize that the thing they are hovering over is a button.

The second sound I made was a confirm click sound. This sound is a similar sound to the first, but at a higher pitch. The sound itself takes a little longer to decay so the audio clip has a bit of a tail. This sound would be attached to a button and when the player clicks to complete a valid command, this sound would play.

The third sound I made is a deny sound. This sound is a sharp sound that sounds very similar to the first hover sound. The difference between this one and the hover sound is this one has a longer decay. This means the audio itself plays for longer, and drops off slower.

The fourth sound I made using BFXR was a cancel sound. This sound is a mid ranged beep that would play when the player would hit the back or previous button in the UI. The sound I went for was a mid ranged pitch so that it wasn’t a positive sound like the confirm sound, but not as low pitch as the deny sound I mentioned previously.

The final sound I made, and my favourite out of the 5 was my invalid input sound. This sound consists of 2 sounds stitched together. This sound is played when a player tries to click an invalid button. It starts with a short, low pitched beep, that then is followed up by a slightly lower pitched beep.

BFXR is a fantastic tool to create basic game sounds for placeholders or for your final game. After playing with it and becoming more familiar with this tool, I will be using it more in future projects.